You are here

open source

To subscribe to the Open Publication Authors' List: Send E-mail to opal-request@opencontent.org with the word "subscribe" in the body. To post to the Open Publication Authors' List: Send E-mail to opal@opencontent.org or simply reply to a previous post. To unsubscribe from the Open Publication Authors' List: Send E-mail to opal-request@opencontent.org with the word "unsubscribe" in the body.

"This bibliography has been compiled by Brenda Chawner, School of Information Management, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, as part of her Ph.D. studies. This is the first version, and it includes announcements, journal articles, and web documents that are about open source software development in libraries. It also includes articles that describe specific open source applications used in libraries, in particular Koha, Greenstone, and MyLibrary."

"In this competitive age, universities are seeking ways to protect their intellectual property, for fear that it might be stolen or used by others without financial benefit coming back to the university. Increasingly, universities are using mechanisms of secrecy to secure their property. This paper argues that this approach is wrong on both moral and business grounds, and that a better model can be found in the Open Source movement of the software industry."

One of the most important philosophical and social issues confronting humanity in the beginning of the 21st century is the sharing of information.

The working assumptions in the dsl.org copyleft grand strategy are the following: data, or information, is not physical; data exists in constant relative abundance; computer software program "source code" is data; with the digital computer it became possible to make unlimited verbatim copies of information without disadvantage -- when you copy data, the original is neither changed nor destroyed. It became apparent that human expression and communication across digital computing networks is actioned through referencing, copying and sampling this weightless, non-physical data. For there to be a free society, any published data ought to be freely shareable -- contrary to current copyright law and assumptions of ``intellectual property.